Ayaan Hirsi Ali: The Global War On Christians In The Muslim World

At least 24 Coptic Christians were killed in Cairo during clashes with the Egyptian Army on Oct. 9. THOMAS HARTWELL / REDUX

It is necessary to establish that there is a latent and global war against Christians in the Muslim world. It is certainly often heard that Muslims are victims of abuses in the West and fighters in the Arab Spring struggle against tyranny. However, it is necessary to point out that, in fact, a completely different type of war is being carried out. Instead, an unrecognized battle that costs thousands of lives. Christians are being killed in the Islamic world because of their religion. It is a rising genocide that should cause a global alarm.

Likewise, the representation of Muslims as victims or heroes is, in the best of cases, partially accurate. In recent years, the violent oppression of Christian minorities has become the norm in Muslim-majority nations that extend from West Africa and the Middle East to South Asia and Oceania.

Now, the fact that in some countries it is the governments and their agents that have burned churches and imprisoned parishioners must be brought up. In others, rebel groups and vigilantes have taken matters into their own hands, killing Christians and expelling them from regions where their roots go back centuries.

Intolerance in its maximum expression

It should be noted that an impartial assessment of recent events and trends leads to the conclusion that the scale and severity of Islamophobia pale in comparison to the bloody Christophobia that currently circulates through Muslim majority nations from one extreme to the another of the world. The conspiracy of silence surrounding this violent expression of religious intolerance has to stop. Nothing less than the fate of Christianity, and ultimately of all religious minorities, in the Islamic world, is at stake.

That being so, the Christophobia that has plagued Sudan for years takes a very different form. The authoritarian rule of Sunni Muslims in the north of the country has tormented Christian and animist minorities in the south for decades. What has often been described as a civil war is, in practice, the sustained persecution of religious minorities by the Sudanese government. This persecution culminated in the infamous genocide in Darfur that began in 2003. Although Sudan’s Muslim President Omar al-Bashir has been accused by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, he has been charged with three counts of genocide and despite the euphoria that greeted the semi-independence granted to South Sudan in July last year, the violence has not ended. In South Kordofan, Christians are still subject to aerial bombardment, selective assassinations, the kidnapping of children and other atrocities.